


Catch Me If You Can

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, TLC compliant, a focus on positive character development, appearances by most of the dreambubble trolls but it seems wrong to tag them all, dreambubble setting, maybe old dogs can't learn new tricks but dead trolls can, they don't have major parts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 19:51:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12515268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: Vriska Serket does her 8est in the afterlife and maybe learns a life lesson or two.





	Catch Me If You Can

**Author's Note:**

> Unlike most of the other stuff I've posted, I feel like this might genuinely be hard to follow if you're not familiar with the AU it's based off of. But for context, in this series of events Aranea and Meenah were killed by Lord English and Vriska ended up joining Tavros's ghost army serving as Light hero 88 for Lord English. This is primarily here for archival purposes but shoutout to anyone who stumbled across it.

“Dreambubbles can be disorienting at first,” Tavros says to a gathered crowd of ghosts. Stating the obvious is a major part of his orientation speech for new recruits.

You lean against the hull of his flagship just out of view, arms crossed. This latest batch was a team effort, same as the one before. You’re not allowed to go out on solo rescue missions yet, only to serve as bait. Apparently you’re “unreliable”, like you weren’t FLARP champion of your hiveblock with all the achievements to your name.  All the important ones, anyway.

You’ve heard the speech plenty of times, first as its victim and now as an observer. You want to jump onto the deck and shove him out of the way so you can set the record straight. “Listen up, losers. We’re not important. We’re not here for a reason, except that we messed up or someone stuck a sword through our backs. We’re dead weight,  _dead_. Get used to it and get moving, unless you want to be dust too.”

That wouldn’t “send the right message”, though, so instead you scowl while Tavros drones on. One day. One day you’ll do it, once you’ve figured out where to go next and are ready to bail. A fitting farewell to this juvenile playacting, to remind them what real go-getters look like.

“There aren’t any obvious boundaries between one place and the next, which you might have noticed,” Tavros goes on. The Boy Skylark can win some achievements for self-evidency, anyway. “And the bubbles themselves tend to, merge together or drift apart. That’s normal. You should just expect that, um, the only thing to expect here is everything changing all the time.” You roll your eyes. Eloquent. “Even you!” he adds. “You’re not bound, to be whoever you were before you came here. Whatever that might be. Even if there are things you feel bad about, or wish you could change. If you take enough steps here, the place you’re in could change into a field, or a mountain, or a lake. There’s no reason, that if you take enough steps, you can’t change into something else too.”

Feel good wiggler crap. You’ve always hated these speeches.

 

“Why are you working with this freakshow?” Eridan asks.

Tavros assigned you to deal with him while he adjusts. You guess your not-leader figures Eridan will respond to a higher blood better, and he has the sense not to ask Feferi to grubsit. So when someone has to deliver marching orders to your newest recruit and you’re not off roaming the fringes of the Furthest Ring, that’s your job.

“I wanted revenge,” you say, tossing the map with Tavros’s latest coordinates in his direction. He doesn’t catch it. Another Eridan helped plan the fleet placements, putting that military history obsession to work, but you’re not going to tell him if he doesn’t ask. “This was a way to get it.”

“Not charging directly at the big bad and getting your ass kicked?” He scoffs, polishing a smudge only he can see off his rifle. “You  _have_ changed.”

“I’m biding my time.” You say it loftily, to suggest plans are already in motion. After all, this was supposed be a temporary arrangement, a way to regain your strength and sense of purpose. Then you’d find a new, bigger plan, a way to take English down once and for all.

It’s been sweeps. You haven’t come up with one yet.

Instead you’ve settled into whatever this existence is, a team member whose role is not being part of the team, bait for a destroyer of worlds. It’s not all bad. Gets the adrenaline pumping, for sure, which is vital in a place that lulls you into quiescence. Even though the Furthest Ring isn’t a natural home for Light players, you’ve gotten good at it. If there’s anything you’ve got a knack for, it’s adapting to places that want to kill you.

You learn how to let memories bubble up from inside you and warp your surroundings into shelter and places to hide. You learn how to leap from bubble to bubble when they’re not quite touching, bracing yourself for the chill of the Furthest Ring and the song of the horrorterrors scraping like frozen blades across your mind. You learn the fickleness of luck (winning a coin toss doesn’t matter if your sister stabs you in the back) and wrap fortune around only the outcomes you’ve thought through. It’s like one of those too-clever storybook genies, twisting your wishes, taking you at your word and leaving you scrambling to set things right. Luck must be handled with care.

English has a lot of luck to steal, at least. Everything works out in his favor in the end – that’s more than luck; it’s certainty. You can’t do much with a probability of 100%, but you can slow him down and leach off bits around the edges, making him a hair too slow and yourself just fast enough. You can dart around the margins of his story, for now.

There are moments where it’s tempting to make your successful outcome exclude you, when oblivion calls with its seductively easy way out. This place drains you. Fighting is hard. But sitting still and remembering is nearly as bad. Everyone’s haunted by their memories. Some are just lucky enough that they can’t see the ghosts.

 

The first time you try the savior gig, it doesn’t go well.

Tavros finally lets you off your leash, mostly because English is gunning for two different locations at once. The whole Time hero thing is a real pain in the ass sometimes. You navigate to a shadowy place made up of forests and deep gorges. Finding dreamers is difficult in the gloom, but eventually you draw together a crowd by tugging their attention your way, another Light trick you’ve learned.

“Hey everyone,” you say. “I’m going to be your rescuer today.”

An Aradiabot sneers. “ _You_? You think you’re helping us?”

“Do you have a problem with that?” you demand. “Is it illegal on some notice plastered up somewhere I didn’t read?”

“It’d be unprecedented.”

Leave it to her robo-clones to hold a grudge, just because of a little bit of murder. “I’m all you’ve got, I’m afraid. Any takers?”

No one else says anything, but they don’t start moving either. What’s their problem? Can’t they see that this is important?

You coax and bully and cajole (but you don’t use mind control, not with the memory of glowing eyes and grasping hands still fresh) but they’re slow to move and there’s no time. “Fine,” you snap. “Tavros can come get you here. I’m supposed to be the bait anyway. I’ll lead English away. But if you can  _possibly_  bear it, it might be a good idea to head in the opposite direction.”

You hear later that about half of them made it out, the other half hit by a strafe of reality-shattering power before English turned to chase you through a land of flashing colors and fireflies. “We rescued ten,” Tavros says. “That’s good.”

“Good?” you repeat. You either win or you lose; there’s no half and half draw. You lost, and you lost because of you. Why didn’t they listen? You recall the disgusted curl of Aradia’s metal lips and are reminded of that brief time in Tavros’s mind, the uncomfortable sensation of looking at yourself from the outside in. No one ever seems to like what they see.

Obviously they’re not looking right. Who knows you better than yourself?

 

Other Alternian dreamers’ gazes on you feel different after that. The Beforans don’t know you, but you don’t want to run into any Araneas or Meenahs (and definitely not Kurloz) so you keep to yourself. That’s your purpose, after all. Keep English away from anyone important. Keep him focused on you.

There aren’t many humans in the bubbles. Their Time hero was careful (afraid) and kept as linear as he could. Your session was too long, too many ways to get things wrong or the wrong sort of right. Aradia needed an army to keep the Black King in check, and she got one. The many ways your species could fuck it up is splattered in bloody colors all across the Furthest Ring.

You do run into him a few times. He’s almost always living in a memory that doesn’t include you, or he knows Alternians only as messages over Pesterchum. If you step into his hive, his eyes slide right past you.

Once, though, you open a door in a land of dark landmasses and cogwheels rising out of lava that reminds you of Karkat’s, walk right into a human bedroom, and nearly jump out of your skin when he says, “Hey.”

“You know who I am?” you ask.

“I know what you are,” he says. “Don’t think we ever talked.”

“No,” you say. “Not out there or in here. None of your selves want to remember.”

“Can’t blame them.” He rubs his eyes, and you see a sliver of white from behind the shades he insists on wearing as they slide up the bridge of his nose. “My friends. Did they get out ok?”

You haven’t heard from anyone living in sweeps. Is the game over? Would you still be here if it was? “I haven’t seen many of them around,” you say. “I think they might have a chance at winning.”

“That’s good.”

You study him – the human Terezi adopted, who you’d taken quick glances at just to see why she’d waste her time on him. You still don’t get it. Except that he does a bad job of hiding himself, and she loves it when people put themselves out there for her while pretending it’s a challenge. Among the humans, his guardian seemed the best at preparing him like Alternia tried to do, but it didn’t work very well. The cracks are obvious.

Did she think yours were obvious too?

“Well, I must’ve taken a wrong turn,” you say, and turn to go. You get your mind right before you twist the knob of the door you just came through, and it opens this time onto the Land of Little Cubes and Tea.

“Nice trick,” he says.

“You can join up, if you want,” you say over your shoulder. “We’re collecting.”

“Nah.” He retreats to his desk, opening a copy of Pesterchum where every contact is stuck on idle. “I did my part. Leave me to play my shitty video games in peace until the Incredible Hulk ushers me past the great beyond.”

 

You send a message to Aradia, since she’s the one who ministers to lost souls brooding forever in their personal memory-holes. She’s good at it, too. “How did you turn into such an expert therapist?” you ask her once, while taking a breather atop a floating lily pad. The last narrow escape involved crawling through clinging vines, and the grasping tendrils ruined your braids. You disentangle your uneven attempt at fixing them and start over. “I don’t remember that being in your skillset.”

“I wasn’t an expert, not at first.” She waves her latest convert away and then plucks at one of your clumsy plaits. “Here, let me.” You flinch – when was the last time someone touched you? – and she clicks her tongue. “You’ve got a knot here. I’ll have to tug. Think you’re tough enough?”

“Sure,” you say, and try to relax like this is normal, like the last person who did this sweeps ago didn’t go up in smoke.

“That’s not the first Latula I’ve talked to,” she says as she works. “Or even the tenth. They have different memories, but a lot of the pain underneath is the same. Eventually you learn the right things to say, even if it’s by trial and error. It’s not hard to sound wise then.”

You remember her kneeling down as you lay sprawled on white sands and wishing your second life was over. “You don’t have that practice with me.”

“No. But it wasn’t hard to guess that you’d want to do something, after what had happened. Beyond that, you’re right. I don’t know what you’re afraid of, or your regrets. But I’m not sure you do either. Besides…” She ties off one braid and moves to the next, easing apart the strands and smoothing them out. “A lot of the dreamers are here because of me. It’s not my fault, entirely, but I still made them. Shouldn’t I make sure they’re happy, as much as they can be?”

Causality tangles you up sometimes, like the twisted corpses of your lusus’s victims dangling like sad party favors from her webs. How much can you say is yours, in a multiverse where so much is foretold? You contacted the humans because of their Jack. Their Jack was able to enter your session because of you. Which comes first? Whose fault is it? Does it matter?

“Do you think I did bad things?” you ask.

“Yes,” she says.

You’re stung by her tone more than anything else, how her fingers don’t even hesitate at their work. “But I didn’t mean to. And there were extenuating circumstances for basically everything. I could list them off. Extenuation after extenuation, like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You didn’t ask me if I thought you had reasons for what you did,” she says, exchanging a smile with a far-off Porrim. “You asked me if you did it.”

There’s not much you can say to that. There usually isn’t.

 

Sometimes you spend some time with the others, before your Light hero aura draws English in too close and you have to leave again. Ghosts come and go, but the group from your timeline has become tight-knit, and sometimes they loosen the weave enough to let you in.

“Vriska!” Nepeta calls. “It’s been sweeps.”

Nepeta has taken to the bubbles well, rubbing shoulders effortlessly with her hordes of alternates, swapping stories and giggling like it’s not uncanny at all. Wherever she is, Feferi is never far behind. You spot her now a little ways back, signing with a Meulin. She picked up Beforan Sign Language fast, saying it would’ve been helpful for working underwater. All of you know the simpler words and use them to communicate in close quarters when danger is too present for speech. You learned “help” first, fist on palm, thumb up, variations in meaning based on the motion of your hands. I help you. You help me. We help each other.

You can’t follow what they’re saying now, but you do catch the sign they’ve created for Lord English: “E” hands held cupping the eyes like the hollow eye sockets of a skull. At least that’s what it’s supposed to look like. It makes you think of people covering their faces in fear, but that’s the kind of thing you’re not supposed to point out. Bad for morale. Like telling people that you’ve been all over the Furthest Ring, and there’s a lot less of it than there used to be.

“Have you heard about our plan?” Nepeta asks, as Feferi jogs over to join her.

“Plan?”

“We’re not supposed to spill the details yet, remember?” Feferi nudges her with her elbow and grins, showing off rows of shark teeth. The sight reminds you of Meenah’s sharp smile, and you swallow. “We have to make sure it works first. Then we’ll tell  _everyone._ ”

“A few more practice rounds would be a good idea. Do you think you can talk Sollux into helping out again?”

“He’ll be grumpy about it, but I’ll try.” Feferi waves at you and sprints off again. She’s animated for a dreamer, but then most people who stay close to Tavros are. Dreamers you have to harangue to even make them look your way perk up at the sight of him, soaking up his assurances that they matter, that they can still grow and change and do things, like Kanaya soaked up sunlight. Is this what the Summoner or Karkat’s ancestor were like, all those sweeps ago? No wonder the Empress wanted both of them dead.

Nepeta’s as cheerful as she always was, but her time here has given her an inner stability you lack. She settles beside you. “I like your bracelets.”

You twist the smooth bands around your wrist. Some of Meenah’s fashion sense stayed; you weren’t copying it all just so she’d like you more. Maybe Alternians as a rule thought fashion was stupid, but Alternians weren’t right about everything. “Thanks. I like your vest.” It must be new, but the cloth is already as ragged as the rest of her clothes. Even when she’s not prowling through jungles, her hands are busy plucking at loose threads or picking at gaps in the weave.

She taps what looks like one of many scales studding the fabric. “I got it from another me. She liked my coat, so we traded. It’s fun to change occasionally.”

You tug at your hair – in a ponytail today – and wonder if she means to tease. “You don’t think it’s weird, meeting other versions of yourself?”

“Why would it be? It’s nice, seeing all the different things I’ve done, like living a million lifetimes with a million possibilities. Of course, not all of them are as lively as us. But they can teach us things.” She nods over at Feferi. “Learning about her other self on Beforus helped her see the problems in her ideas of reform. Although knowing us lowbloods alone might’ve done the trick! Sometimes you need another perspective to navigate, like our maps where you need a bunch of coordinates to know where to go.”

You and Tavros haven’t spoken again about your brief time in each other’s minds. Sollux and Eridan pretend it never happened. Feferi and Nepeta are the only two who emerged without unease, although Feferi does joke that it helps to have four hands again. What would it be like, to not mind someone seeing you that closely? “Are you two matesprits?” you ask.

She blushes olive and punches you on the shoulder. “Don’t be nosy!”

“Fiiiiiiiine. I thought you liked that kind of gossip.”

“It’s different when it’s about you.” The blush hasn’t left her cheeks.

“I won’t pry then. But if you need me to find you some chalk in a memory to update your shipping wall, let me know. I find lots of great loot out there.” You turn out your empty pockets for her inspection. “I’ll have to bring back presents next time. We can have a late perigree’s eve party. Or early. I can’t keep track, but we’ve probably missed a hundred or so.”

“I’d like a celebration. Even if it’s a ‘we survived this long’ party.” Nepeta digs her nails under the edge of another scale on her vest. “Sometimes I forget you’re from our timeline,” she says frankly. “You’re a lot nicer now.”

You stuff your pockets back in your pants, unsure of how to respond. “Thanks?”

“Sorry if that was rude.” She sneaks a look over at you from underneath her bangs. “I meant it as a compliment.”

“There’s not much of a standard of comparison. There aren’t any other mes out there.”

“Even if you can’t see them walking around, you can meet the versions of yourself that you used to be.” She taps her chest. “They’re all still right here.”

“I’m not looking for enlightenment in your rumblespheres,” you say, and she snorts so loud you start laughing too.

 

Sollux approaches you not long after. You’re not sure if he’s half dead again now that Eridan’s back. He doesn’t like to be asked. His lisp is still gone, replaced by the hollow tones you remember from Aradia’s post-death days. “I still don’t trust you,” he says.

“Hello to you too.”

He ignores you. “AA thinks it’s not her place to judge, and Nepeta and Feferi always look for the best in people. But me? I remember what you made me do. You  _liked_ it.”

He’s right. Oh, Scratch helped talk you into things, but the sick twists on top? Those were yours. Making Tavros fly off a cliff like Pupa Pan, sending Sollux to kill Aradia for you – you prided yourself on getting people where it hurt them most. It showed you were clever, someone not to be messed with. You’d meant to leave an impression. Looks like you succeeded.

“I’ve kept you safe here,” you say.

“And I want to know why. You never do  _anything_  if there isn’t something in it for you.”

You hug your knees. “Eridan asked the same thing.” Maybe that’ll put him off.

“I hate the bastard, but he’s got a point.”

“I want English to suffer,” you say, because it’s the truth. And to your surprise, the next bit is too. “And I want to be better than him.”

He scowls. “At least he’s impersonal about killing us.”

Did he come out here to insult you? Look at yourself from another perspective, Nepeta said, so you try. It’s tricky, but so is shuffling through a life and death’s worth of memories and dragging them out into the world. Mental acrobatics keep you safe these days. What memories would he have of you?

Vriska Serket, Mindfang wannabe and power gamer extraordinaire, always ready to leave her team without their strongest player in the middle of a melee if it meant netting more xp or the choicest treasure. One time you deliberately stepped on an alarmed panel to summon an emerald basilisk for its drops, even though no one else near you had the levels to deal with it. You’d only laughed when it plowed through them and nearly reduced Tavros’ gel viscosity to zero. Even on Alternia, land of a bunch of rowdy wigglers with no self-control, you’d built a reputation as someone who left broken people and broken things in her wake. Now you’re all trapped in a shrinking space with a killer who’s got your scent. You may be the expendable one, the distraction, but you have the power to kill them all just by sitting still. No wonder he’s worried.

“I’m not planning anything,” you say. “No scheme that’ll blow up in my face, no duplicitous double crosses. You don’t have to worry about me, I promise.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you, just like that?”

“Tavros trusts me.”

He snorts. “He’s an optimist. But I’ll believe him more than anything you tell me.”

You look up at the cracking void, at all the damage English has left behind that the rest of you could never fix, not in a million sweeps. “That’s probably for the best.”

 

Time doesn’t pass the same way here. You’re old, so old, but you can’t age, and so you never grow out of ancient hurts or childish arguments. Those things keep most of the dead chained down reliving their petty problems until English blasts them to smithereens. That works in the gods’ favor. Maybe the dead are happier that way too; you don’t know.

You try to avoid Terezis. You’ve never seen the one from your timeline. She’d be older now; you don’t know by how much. You haven’t seen another you out here either. God Tiering so early, most of them probably faded in doomed timelines. The ones who died would have been easy prey for English’s rampage. You don’t want to talk to these fellow sisterless members of Team Scourge. You’re not looking for each other.

One does talk to you, though, when you’re shepherding people into a cave that turns into paneled meteor hallways that turn into a beach where Tavros’ ship is waiting. She’s lingering behind, and English nearly catches you. The first memory that springs to mind as a hiding place is your old clubhouse deep in the Alternian forest. You both squeeze inside the structure of fallen branches and propped up boards, and she runs her fingers over a curling Mindfang drawing. Sheesh, you were embarrassing. Can she see it? You don’t know if death has restored her eyesight. Her eyes are white now, just like yours.

“Sorry for the crummy accommodations,” you say. “I don’t want to lead him after the others, so we’ll lie low for a while and then jump somewhere else.”

“It’s fine,” she says, hunkering down on a locked treasure chest. “I haven’t been here in a long time.”

“Brings back memories, huh?” You look up, where light filters through the cracking roof. The two of you share this part of your past, at least.

“Lots.”

“What happened to you?” you ask, cautiously. With the way timelines work, you’re not sure whether the Terezi who would’ve died if you’d gone after Jack exists as a dreamer or only as a possibility. One day you’re afraid you’ll run into one who’s here because of you.

She sighs, digging her fingers into the seams between the planks of the treasure chest. “Most of us died fighting the Black King. Feferi’s lusus getting prototyped was a big mistake. Aradia reversed, of course, but… a psychic blast isn’t Heroic or Just, and you must’ve come back before she doomed the timeline, so you didn’t show up here.”

“I’ve never met another me,” you say. “Probably for the best. We’d get into fights. Too many strong personalities; you know how it is. I’m always right, obviously, but what happens if I disagree?”

She snickers at that, like you’d hoped. It’s been a long time since you’ve heard her laugh. No one else has one like it. “I was worried about her. We’d never completely patched things over after FLARP, and she was always so reckless. We were supposed to be in charge of a whole world once we won. I didn’t know if you could handle that. I’m glad I met you, even if you’re not her. It’s nice to know you turned out alright.”

“That’s me,” you say. “Turned out great.” And then, to change the subject, you add, “We kind of won. But something happened, right at the end, so we never got to rule over the humans we made. You’re right, though. We would have messed it up.”

“So you won. How did you die?” she asks.

“I made a mistake,” you tell her. “That’s all.”

You could have kissed this one, maybe, a replay of the one time you’d bumped noses and clicked teeth in the real version of this clubhouse and then never spoken of it again. But you don’t. You want the Terezi who knows everything, the truly colossal magnitude of your mistakes, to look at you now and say she’s glad you turned out alright.

 

“They call me the Salvager?” Tavros asks.

You’re sitting on the edge of the flagship after a successful retrieval. You still ask before dropping by, even after all these sweeps. At first it was annoying. Did he want you to wear a collar with a bell? Now, after seeing the doubt in others’ eyes when you come to their aid, you understand a little better. Continuing to ask permission is a peace offering. He’s never said no.

“That’s right, boss.” It’s a joke, but you don’t load the term with irony like you used to. “Someone picking up the garbage.” You wave away his affronted expression. “Metaphorical garbage. Providing succor to lost souls, if you like that better.”

“So it’s a good thing, then.”

“Usually. Some people think you’re in league with English, since you show up with him right ahead of you or right behind. I straighten them out.”

“And they listen to you?”

You shrug. “I’m getting well known too.”

“Do they call you anything?”

“Not as far as I know. They say you must be lucky, and that’s all thanks to me, so maybe that should be my title. Fortun8.” You count. “Nope, only seven letters. We can’t go breaking long established patterns, not at our age.”

“Do you think you’re lucky?”

You flick a splinter of dream-wood off into the sand. “Luck is a tricky thing. It’s not always what you think it is. Maybe it’s unlucky to die, but… I don’t know what I’d be like if I hadn’t. I don’t know if I ever would’ve stopped running into trouble and getting people hurt. So maybe things worked out ok.”

He nods. “They did for me. I’m not saying what you did to me wasn’t bad, because it was, but. It could’ve ended worse.”

“Yeah,” you say, “it could’ve.”

 

The next time you serve as anything more than bait, you arrive in a bubble that mixes the spires of Prospit with the craggy cliffs you recognize from home. Most of the trolls you see are Beforan, a crew you mostly avoid to dodge the drama. And you thought  _your_  teammates were obnoxious. An Aranea looks your way, but you don’t meet her eyes. The last thing you need is her “learning” from you again. John has come and gone, bearing news of his session’s near-disaster. You know what your brief stint at role-modeling cost.

“Listen up, everyone,” you call. “This is important.”

“I remember you,” Karkat’s ancestor says. Great, are you in for one of his speeches? “You wanted us to listen before. You stole our minds.”

The army feels like a lifetime ago. That version of you died with Meenah and Aranea. So many versions of you have died. But he doesn’t know that. There’s a crowd of spirits looking at you with a mix of confusion and suspicion. There’s a killer Lord of Time on his way, and there are a few minutes for you to make this count. What will make them trust you? What will make you trust yourself?

You take a breath and look at yourself from the outside in.

Who is Vriska Serket? Your past is checkered like the Battlefield with versions of yourself created for survival or approval, emulation or redemption. What you neglected to ask Nepeta was how to tell which one was really you. You can imagine her laughing and pointing to herself again, saying “ _This_ one, silly. And all the others. I’m  _me_.”

Maybe there’s something that’s truly you, a core to your soul that persists between timelines. Maybe you’re something you make, piece by piece and day by day. Maybe you’re made by other people, what they see and what they think. You can’t control that. All you can control is what you do.

So you don’t say it wasn’t your fault, or it’s all in the past, or it could’ve been a whole lot worse. You say, “I’m sorry.” You say, “This time, I’m here to help.”

And this time, they listen.

 

On your own again, you watch paradox space crack and shatter around you. The death of multiverses puts on a display to put anyone else’s light show to shame. English is like you, the ultimate power gamer, smashing his way to a high score, uncaring of everyone crushed along the way. You can only ever stay a step ahead of him, only barely keep the damage under control. Maybe you think that’s enough, repurposing your luck, making a billion wishes to undo the damage the first ones caused. One day you’ll have to stop running, turn around, and look him in the eye. But beating him won’t redeem you. Another you learns this, dueling Jack not in a blaze of glory but with corpses at your feet and hatred in your heart. A possibility, a lesson you never got to learn.

That’s your whole existence, teetering on the brink of revelation, balanced on a knife’s edge between hero and villain, afraid to drop off because you don’t know where you’ll land. Skaia tells you that narrow space in-between is how you stay alive, after all. Who would you be if you’d ever stopped running? Would you be you?

Behind you, Lord English tears his way through space, smashing reality into splinters and shards. The bubble you’re in breaks off at your feet to make a cliff opening out into nothingness. Far below you, you can see another bubble, pearly-white and almost as small.

One day you’ll turn around and face him. One day your past will catch up with your present, and both of them will be over. But not today.

“Catch me if you can,” you say, and jump.


End file.
